Salamander season

On wet, rainy spring nights at March's end, when the rest of the indoor world is warm and dry, the salamander people grab their ponchos and head into the dark drizzle.

If their timing is right, they can see an astonishing annual spectacle - a landscape alive with salamanders, vernal pools teeming by the hundreds, by the thousands.
"This is happening all across the state," said Billy Michael of Bethel, as he drove down a narrow road to a small pool on Terre Haute, the 630-acre tract of undeveloped land on the Bethel-Danbury line.
Michael hit the brakes. Crossing the road was a fat, eight-inch-long, yellow-spotted salamander, the most common species out that night. They spend almost their entire lives underground. On these spring nights, they come out of their dens to mate.
"There are places in Massachusetts where they've built conduits under the road to let the salamanders pass," said salamander fan

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, a biology professor at
Western Connecticut State University
in Danbury.
Once parked, Michael got his gear and walked along a path covered with soaked leaves. Ducking under half-fallen trees, he came to the end of the trail - a hidden vernal pool.
"Look at them!" he said. "Look at them!"
Dozens and dozens of yellow-spotted salamanders were stewing around in the water, then scooting into its leafy, littered, mud bottom to hide when the flashlight's beam falls on them for more than a few seconds.
Michael's son, Will, joined him later that evening. So did salamander fans from Ridgefield. Before the night was out, they'd see three species of salamanders - yellow-spotted, Jefferson and four-toed.
"I love it so much," Will said. "My friends go out for a beer on nights like this and I say 'I'm going out to watch salamanders.'"--photo1L--
This has been going on since the Devonian era, which ended 345 million years ago. Before the dinosaurs, there were amphibians like salamanders silently hopping, stepping and jumping across the earth.
"It's been happening for millions and millions of years," said

Michael Klemens
, senior conservationist for the
Wildlife Conservation Society
- which runs environmental projects worldwide, including management of the
Bronx Zoo
- and director of the society's
Metropolitan Conservation Alliance
. "These are very primitive creatures."
Like frogs and toads, salamanders are amphibians, the class of cold-blooded animals that begin life in water with gills, but which later develop lungs and move onto land.
Unlike the little red, four-legged creatures you find in stone walls - which are actually newts, another amphibian - the salamanders that come out on spring nights aren't easy to find. At least four species in Connecticut are called mole salamanders because, like moles, they live underground - often in mole tunnels eating worms and insects.
"They're nocturnal, solitary and hard to see," Dye said.
But there is a two- to three-week window every year - from mid-March to early April - when they shed their secret ways and move into the open to mate.
"This only happens in the spring, at night, when it's raining," said Dye, who has been scouting salamanders for 15 years at the Westside Nature Preserve at the edge of the university's Westside Campus.
Salamanders head to vernal pools - dips and bowls in the landscape that fill with water in the spring, then dry up by summer. The salamanders use the same pools year after year.
Once they arrive, the males - who arrive first - eject their sperm into the water . Then, they nudge and nuzzle the females into action. The females move over to the sperm and use the lips of their cloacas - the opening of both their reproductive and intestinal tracts - to pull the sperm packets in.
The sperm fertilizes the eggs in the female. They then eject their eggs, which soon form huge, jelly-like masses in the pools. The eggs hatch, and you have salamander pollywogs. Some salamanders live out their youth in these ponds, burrowing into the mud and wintering there. When they are adults, they head upland and move underground.
Will Michael 21, studies communications and biology at WestConn. He puts both of those disciplines to use in his other career - he's the producer and host of "Connecticut Naturalist," a show carried by seven TV cable providers including

Comcast and Charter Communications
. One of his biggest thrills has been capturing the salamander migration on videotape for his show.
"To have the whole lens filled with these wiggling, spotted salamanders was fantastic," he said.
Klemens - who was over at the Quinebaug Valley in eastern Connecticut salamander-watching this spring - did some of his pioneering amphibian research at the vernal pools of Terre Haute. It was there he found that Jefferson salamanders - which are colored a sort of dusty purple - reproduce in at least two distinct ways.
With some, he said, the normal cycle happens - the male ejects his sperm, the female takes it, and the sperm fertilizes her eggs.
But there are some female Jefferson salamanders who have been hybridized - they're crosses of Jefferson and other species. They take in sperm, and it stimulate the eggs into reproducing. But it doesn't actually fertilize anything.
"What she's doing is cloning herself, essentially," Klemens said. Therefore, he said, Jefferson salamander males have to be particularly assiduous about finding females who actually mate with them - otherwise, there's no future males and eventually, no Jefferson salamanders.
Klemens said the salamanders develop such procreative methods to survive things like Ice Ages.
"They can do it all," he said.
What the miracle of the spring migration also proves is the importance of vernal pools - spots that developers, eyeing the landscape, are likely to disregard.
But
Nick Miller
, manager of the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance, said these pools are vital to many creatures. After the amphibians leave their egg masses behind, he said, spotted turtles come and feed on the eggs, traveling from pool to pool for food. Once the amphibians grow up, they become food for woodland birds and mammals. Without vernal pools, you damage a range of animal life.
Miller and Klemens said that proves towns have to do comprehensive environmental planning. They can't just preserve vernal pools. They have to preserve the upland territory around them because that's where the salamanders actually live for all but two or three weeks in spring.
What communities need to do, Klemens said, is to think in terms of preserving big tracts of land, so that creatures like yellow-spotted salamanders can move across the landscape, just as water flows across it. They have to stop thinking about this parcel or that, and look at the big picture - at wildlife corridors and regional conservation.
"Thinking town by town doesn't work," Klemens said. "We know now that salamanders in Wooster State Park in Danbury go to Bennett's Pond in Ridgefield to breed. They don't stop at town lines."

To learn more about salamanders, go to the Westside Nature Center's Web site at
www.wcsu.edu/wnt